Position Peace

My two cents (and that's about what they'll be worth-- I've got no time now or in the days ahead to write proper on this matter) on the rationale for invading Iraq:

Pre the war, you couldn't have argued with the idea that freedom for Iraq and the end of Hussein's regime wouldn't be the ideal-- or at least you shouldn't have. And you can't now-- it ain't humane. But the disconnect between what can be achieved practically on the ground and what can't/couldn't has always been the sticking point, hasn't it? I'm a realist on this question, and always have been-- as was Bush I and Clinton, too. A quick tactical look at the campaign before we knew what we know now-- the region's a terrorist hotbed, invasion will no doubt fuel Al Qaeda's recruitment campaign nitrous style, Sunni ex-Baathists will be pissed, we can therefore expect savage and probably WMD enabled resistance; Iran's right next door drooling all over the oil and the easily swayed Shiite majority in Iraq; loose WMD everywhere post a win, WMD dropping on US troops and allies during the war, and Hussein's missiles launched into nuke-enabled/trigger-happy Israel; a likely oil field torching that would make Kuwait's truly massive disaster look like a cozy campfire; an enormous humanitarian crisis as millions of Food-for-Oil dependents starve within days of the war effort; and a sour international scene limiting allied cooperation resulting in the US taking on much of the effort unilaterally; an intensely factioned and tribal populace making post-war unification and democracy tricky at best; an opponent with cultural values that reject surrender as a conflict resolution option, preferring and embracing fighting to the death; I could go on---- it was a nightmare. These are all points I raised with Jonathan before the war. And the fact that more than half this stuff didn't materialize (WMD, torched oil fields, humanitarian crisis, Israeli involvement, etc.) didn't happen just means that not only is Hussein crazy but that he's also really stupid, and that, more importantly, we got really really really lucky. The stuff we're facing now was totally foreseeable, and it could have been oh much much worse-- incredible when you think of how poorly Bush planned for what has actually taken place.

So Bush knowingly or in ignorance took big gambles on the Risk board, and it paid off initially-- bully-hoo for the president's good dice. But of course, the remaining factors are still in play, and despite the fact that this is the rosey scenario-- it still sucks! Despite the good fortune we've had with troop body counts and all the crap that could have happened not happening, this war has still cost the US plenty on foreign policy, financial, military defensive grounds and more-- the payoff will need to be sweet. It'll have to look like the Iraq envisioned by Michael Moore's "F. 9/11" (irony intended) and soon for this thing not to be a net loss when the sum of its impact is added up. And hey, maybe Bush's luck will continue to hold, and maybe with a few more Fallujah's and after the elections the foreign resistance forces will sorta go away, and nobody will care that the US is still around afterwards, and Iran's perverted old men will suddenly stop taking interest in the little girl who moved in next door, and the Sunnis will just kinda say "ah heck!" and just decide to leave the new government alone. It could happen. I hope so. I'll gladly eat my cred. on the issue if it does. But I don't like these odds.

In sum, despite my favoring the general ideals of democratization in Iraq and everywhere else for that matter, (which I do and did, very much), I didn't and don't see invasion and nation-building there as a particularly safe or viable or timely or measured approach to the threat posed by Hussein. Not when Afghanistan still needed our nation-building attention, not while Osama and Al Qaeda was still heavily in play, and not while we had so much more performing to do on the good-cop act with the Muslim world. If we really wanted to make the case for modernization/democratization as the way to go in the Middle East, we could have done that with stunning effectiveness in Afghanistan-- a place we'd already invaded just months before. Iraq has now, if anything, buried the wider PR relevance of that successful example-- a real pity.

No on this war-- I'd have played the patience/inspections game a little longer with Iraq, despite that tact's many shortcomings.

PS-- as a voter, I might have remained against the war even if I thought nation-building in Iraq was in all likelihood a winning option just to spite Bush/Cheney/Fox News et al. for the outrageously misleading rhetoric on the Iraq-WMD assurances and worse, the Iraq-9/11 implication. I'm still pissed.

Cheerio!

Mooks